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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Every couple of years, the hope surfaces that a simple graphical interface will replace teams of developers. Business people to quickly and easily create beautiful expressions of their ideas and launch them into production seamlessly. A handful of startups in every generation take up this challenge, and they mostly fail.

Why do people keep trying to breathe life into a solution that is so obviously doomed to fail is an interesting question, but a more useful question would be why is it doomed to fail, and what are the alternatives.

The reason why companies keep trying to create canvas driven development tools has 2 components. The first is that as a software engineer, you learn to map out your ideas in some visual representation. These simple flow charts, UML diagrams, or high fidelity mockups then have to be translated to code that a computer can interpret. During the design phase the process feels really smooth, you clarify your thoughts and produce a lot of value in a relatively short amount of time, if only the actual coding could be this frictionless. The second reason is that working with developers can be frustrating. Business people often have to contend with neverending lists of constraints in terms of what the "system" can and cannot do, or constant excuses for why deadlines were not met because of some unforeseen technical difficulty. Surely there has to be a better way. Where these two motivations meet, a business idea is born: "Let's create a tool that makes building software as easy as drawing up a flow diagram!"

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